Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Leadership is often understood as soft skills, but in substance, leadership is a distinctive capability with “hardcore” -knowledge, insight, and wisdom. Capabilities are an accumulation of competencies or recombinant skills (both hard and soft) which are used for achieving the strategic goals. Leadership is about future, future implicates changes and innovation. Leadership is an influence, the leader’s influence is based on the ability to inspire, confidence to assert, wisdom to negotiate, and uniqueness to bridging. Here are three aspects of leadership as capability:

Influence ability: It is not possible to separate influence from leadership. Influence and persuasion are so closely linked they are probably the same thing. To lead you to need to persuade others to follow and do things you envision to achieve, they will not follow unless they are influenced by the leaders' clear vision and the capability to persuasion. And vision, knowledge, insight, and wisdom are the best instrument to make a long-lasting influence. There are various levels at which leadership is exercised. At its core leadership is about influencing people to act in a particular way. What leadership focuses on is about leading with purpose and intent to achieve particular objectives. Leadership is about identifying and envisioning a worthy objective, and engaging people to work towards that objective. The leadership responsibility falls in the ability of the leaders to be an example to follow. Great leaders are not afraid to follow as well. If you are leading and not willing to learn, grow and share then you are just talking the talking without leadership effectiveness.

Intellectual decision-making & problem-solving capability:One of the significant works for leaders is to make decisions. Being decisive, getting to the root cause, defining problems are all important, but very few can get them all right. It is a distinctive leadership ability to differentiate a great leader from average managers. What keeps leaders successful is their intellectual curiosity and ability to continuously be open to learning and applying these learnings as they move forward. The authentic leaders with high intelligence have adaptability, consistency, profundity, and empathy to master business dynamic and cultural differences. They present the ability to manage COMPLEXITY in high digital transparency and stressful digital dynamic. Know what gives you joy. Know your talents. Make decisions that help others via empathy and solving problems via digging into root causes. Build teams that build up the members of the team. Don't break people down. With overloading information and shortened knowledge lifecycle, leaders’ capability is less about how to answer all questions, but how to be able to re-frame the problems by asking the right questions to gain collective wisdom to make effective decisions.

Managing Strategy-Execution capability: Digitalization means change, the consistent flow, the continuous improvement and the persistent pursuit. Leaders need to learn, delearn, and relearn all the time. With the accelerated speed of changes, high-capable leaders have to continue to sharpen skills and build the distinctive capability to lead more effectively. Execution has to connect more non-linear dots. It is a broadened arena which has to connect more non-linear dots and take multi-disciplinary understanding. Business leaders need to find new ways to hasten their collective best thinking efforts – especially in larger organizations, where it is crucial that one does not exclusively rely on his/her own limited brain-power. Large groups can interact and be able to divide and conquer a complex challenge to accelerate your solution forming capabilities if done right.

Leadership is neither a title nor a paper certificate; neither a soft skill only or a few spotlight moments. It's a capability to make a continuous delivery and maintain a consistent reputation. The hard core of leadership capabilities strengthens leadership effectiveness and highlights leadership substance. Leadership effectiveness is based on leader’s influence intelligence - not just a title, but the heart-touching and mind connecting empathy; a clear vision, not just descriptive communication; adaptability not just controlling; insight and wisdom, not just knowledge; with the ability in making the right decision, building capability-based strategy and execute it cohesively.